Geological and Geophysical Studies

The South China Sea is one of the largest marginal basins in the western Pacific, and understanding how it formed requires tracing roughly 65 million years of continental rifting, seafloor spreading, and crustal deformation that reshaped the region during the Cenozoic era. Geologists and geophysicists working here combine seismic surveys, drilling records, and plate reconstructions to map the deep structure of the crust and test competing models for how the basin opened and eventually stopped spreading around 15 million years ago. Central debates concern whether the rifting was driven primarily by far-field collisional forces, by mantle dynamics beneath the lithosphere, or by some combination of both — and how episodes of volcanism fit into that story. Ongoing work is also clarifying how the basin's sedimentary record and its surrounding marginal sub-basins preserve evidence of these tectonic events, with implications for regional resource assessment and for understanding analogous basins worldwide.

Works

127,631

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677,743

Keywords

Plate TectonicsCenozoic EvolutionRiftingCrustal StructureTectonic ModelSeafloor Spreading